The following article was extracted from the keynote address delivered before the 23rd annual meeting of the Oromo Studies Association (OSA) on August 1, 2009 at the Georgia State University in Atlanta. Professor William I. Robinson was the Keynote speaker; he is a professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies, at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Professor Robinson’s latest book is Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)

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THE CRISIS OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM: CONTEXTUALIZING THE OROMO STRUGGLE

By William I. Robinson*

I am not an expert on Africa. I did spend three years in the late 1970s as a student in East and West Africa, where I studied African history and political economy. It was during those formative years that I forged an anti-colonial consciousness and commitment to struggles for social justice. I traveled in the early 1980s from Africa to Central America to participate in the revolutionary movements then breaking out in that region, and stayed there into the early 1990s, at which point I returned to the United States after a 13-year journey abroad to undertake my graduate studies. In 1996 I took up an appointment at the University of Tennessee where I met my friend and colleague, Professor Asafa Jalata, one of the leading scholars worldwide of Oromo studies. It was thanks to him that I first learned of the Oromo struggle and gained a greater historical understanding of the Horn of Africa. But I was unable, after leaving Tennessee in 1998, to continue my engagement with Oromo studies. My expertise is globalization, Latin America, and U.S. foreign policy, and the intensive focus of my work is the critique of global capitalism.

I, therefore, cannot speak to you today about the Ethiopian empire and the Oromo struggle – on these matters, I am your student! Rather, I wish to focus on global capitalism and its crisis. Globalization is fundamentally altering politics, economic processes, social forces, and terrains of struggle everywhere. Events in recent years in Ethiopia have unfolded within the world historic dynamics of capitalist globalization, and now in the context of the system’s crisis. Global capitalism and its crisis is the broader context of Oromo struggles. This “big picture,” I hope, will offer great explanatory power and, therefore, be useful to you in your own analyses of the Ethiopian empire and the Oromo reality.

Global capitalism is in “its worst crisis since the 1930s,” as many have pointed out. But it is more than that. It is truly a crisis of humanity, of civilizational proportions. The stakes are so high, the means of destruction so massive, the unfolding ecological holocaust so severe, that our very survival is at risk. We face a crossroads in the early 21st century, an unstable and open-ended transition that involves much chaos and presents dangers as well as opportunities. Any solution to the crisis requires not just political action but also historical-theoretical understanding of this moment.

Ethiopia, Oromia, and the Epochs of World Capitalism

How has world capitalism qualitatively evolved in recent decades? Globalization represents a qualitatively new transnational stage in the ongoing evolution of world capitalism. Among the fundamental shifts in the system are the following four:

1) The rise of truly transnational capital and the integration of every country into new global production and financial system;
2) The appearance of a transnational capitalist class, a class group grounded global markets and circuits of accumulation rather than national markets and circuits. This transnational capitalist class is a new global ruling class.
3) The rise of a transnational state apparatus – a loose network comprised of supranational political and economic institutions together with national state apparatuses that have been penetrated and transformed by transnational forces.
4) Novel relations of power and inequality, and new modalities of domination, in global society.

If globalization represents a new stage, what stages preceded it? In periodizing the distinct epochs of world capitalism, we can observe that each epoch has had major implications for Oromia:

1) The epoch of mercantile capitalism, or of primitive accumulation, ran roughly from the conquest of the Americas, starting in the symbolic year 1492, to another symbolic year, that of the French Revolution, 1789. It was during this sweeping epoch that the world market came into existence, the system began its outward expansion, and the inter-state system was created. Europe at this time began to encroach on Africa, reshaping African processes, such as state formation, including state formation and social development in Oromia, and what today we refer to as the Horn of Africa;
2) The epoch of industrial, or competitive, capitalism ran from 1789 to the late 1800s. It was in this epoch that the bourgeoisie consolidated its power as the ruling class, the nation-state became the principal form of world political organization, the industrial revolution took place, and the system entered a frantic new round of expansion, including the outright colonization of Africa by the European powers. It was during this epoch that Ethiopia begins its own imperial expansion and conquest of the Oromo, a process that cannot be understood outside of the larger systemic dynamics;
3) By the late 1800s we transition into the epoch of what I refer to as national corporate capitalism and what others have called “monopoly” capitalism, a period that opens with the classical imperialism of which Lenin wrote and brings us into the 1970s. We saw during this period the consolidation of national markets, the rise of giant national corporations that in the wake of World War II began to internationalize, and, of course, more of the ceaseless expansion of the system. This was also a time of revolutions – the Bolshevik, Chinese, and Cuban, to name, but a few – the rise of the Third World, great anti-colonial and national liberation struggles, decolonization, and transitions to neo-colonialism. Ethiopia during this time experienced a deeper integration into the world capitalist system under the regime of Haile Selassie as Oromo labor and resources became more fully captured by world capitalism via Ethiopian domination.

The Breakdown of National Corporate Capitalism and the Onset of Globalization

In the wake of World War II, after the stormy period of fierce class struggles in the cores of world capitalism, world wars, and the Great Depression, a new social structure of accumulation became consolidated at the world level, that of “Fordist-Keynesian capitalism.” Fordism involved a new model of standardized mass production and mass consumption in the affluent regions together with a capital-labor relation that combined tight control by capital over labor and over cultural and political life with pacification of that labor by mass consumption and the promise of rising standards of living. Keynesianism integrated into the structure of world capitalism the measures proposed by the British economist John Keynes, who argued that in order to avoid crisis the state must intervene to regulate accumulation, to redistribute values, and to boost demand.

Fordist-Keynesian capitalism took the model form of social welfare, social democratic, and “New Deal” states in the First World. In the Third World it took the model form of developmentalist states, although, of course, only a minority of middle and urban working classes in the former colonial regions experienced rising standards of living as they became integrated into developmental capitalism. In the so-called “Second World,” it took the model form of self-declared “socialism” that involved as well a rapid rise in living standards coupled with tight control from above. While there were countless variants the Fordist-Keynesian social structure of accumulation all three models shared two key components: a major role for the state in regulating accumulation and a significant redistributive component.

National corporate capitalism broke down in the 1970s. Nation-state capitalism entered into crisis. In essence, capital outgrew the set of nation-state/inter-state institutions through which it had developed previously. As the Fordist-Keynesian social structure of accumulation began to unravel, all three models experienced crises of legitimacy. The key period was 1968-1973. We were moving towards systemic crisis, a crisis that was as much political and ideological as it was economic.

The year 1968 symbolized a rapidly expanding counter-hegemony at the systemic level. A year earlier, Che Guevara had been captured and executed in Bolivia. The year 1968 saw the uprising of students and workers in Paris, the Prague Spring, and the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City to repress the growing mass movement of workers, students, and peasants. The Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive in 1968, marking the beginning of the end of the U.S. war against Indochina. In China, the Cultural Revolution was at its height. In the United States, the Black and Chicano liberation movements, the anti-war movement, the women’s and the counter-cultural movement placed ruling groups on the defensive. This was the height of armed national liberation movements against remaining colonial regimes and against dictatorships, of radical and socialist-oriented projects.

Then came the economic – structural – crisis in 1973; a crisis of profits, of investment opportunities, of energy and of financial stability, expressed as “stagflation” (inflation + stagnation). Working and popular classes around the world refused to shoulder the burden of this crisis. Coming on the heels of worldwide mass struggles, they were able in that decade to exercise enough collective strength to make it impossible for capital to transfer to them the burden of the crisis. The mechanisms of hegemony were breaking down. This is what the elites from the Trilateral Commission famously referred to at that time as the “crisis of democracy,” by which, of course, they did not mean that democracy was under threat but rather that popular forces all over the world were demanding too much democracy and that the system could not contain these forces from below within the logic of the prevailing system and its forms of cultural, political and economic organization. This was a breakdown of consensual domination.

In Ethiopia mass uprisings took place – part and parcel of this worldwide crisis. This was the eve of the overthrow the Haile Selassie regime.

Dominant groups from the cores of the world capitalist system asked themselves how they could they undertake a vast restructuring of the system. How could they face the crisis, reverse the strength of popular classes, re-impose discipline, and reconstitute hegemony? Emergent transnationally-oriented elites began to organize. They set up in 1973, among many other forums, the Trilateral Commission. In essence, capital responded to the crisis of Fordist-Keynesian capitalism by going global. The 1980s and 1990s, we saw the unraveling of redistributive social welfare projects in the First World, the breakdown of developmentalist projects in the Third World, and the outright collapse of the statist redistributive projects in the Second World. It was clear that “socialism in one country,” nor “Keynesianism in one country,” were any longer viable in the emerging stage of global capitalism.

Capital launched a worldwide offensive to break free from nation-state constraints to accumulation. It achieved a new global mobility that brought about a chance in the worldwide correlation of class and social forces. In the latter decades of the 20th century a new model of capitalism emerged. Four mechanisms, among others, stand out that allowed new global elites to restore the prospects for worldwide for accumulation:

First is the imposition of a new capital-labor relation or the normalization of new systems of labor control, based on a “cheapening” of labor made possible by global capital mobility and by new technologies that allowed capital to integrate and reorganize production worldwide. The capital-labor relation has been deregulated everywhere as labor has been flexibilized and casualized. New modes of labor control include outsourcing, deunionization, feminization, contract and contingent labor, and so on. The “Fordist labor regime” involved certain reciprocities between capital and labor mediated by the state and it has been replaced by the “Walmartization of labor” and the free trade zone, or maquiladora, regime, whereby workers face the unmediated domination of capital.

Second is a new round of the extensive and intensive expansion of capitalism. This expansion has been intensive in the sense that there are no longer any regions that lay outside the system. For the first time in world history, the entire planet has been brought into a single capitalist system so that we can speak of a new globality. The countries that had tried to chart an alternative to integration into the system, such as the former Soviet bloc or the Third World revolutionary states, have been incorporated. But extensive expansion also includes a deeper transnational capitalist penetration of remote regions within nations that had previously been less fully integrated into capitalism and its logic or that had managed to retain some degree of autonomy – such as Amazonia in South America, Chiapas in Southern Mexico, or Oromia in Ethiopia. The expansion of world capitalism has also been intensive, in the sense that public and community spheres that previously laid outside the logic of accumulation or of exchange-value have been commodified – turned into profit-making spheres controlled by capital – through privatization, intellectual property rights, and other mechanisms. Hence educational and health systems have been privatized, as have basic public services such as water and electricity. Non-capitalist forms of property such as community land holdings have been progressively broken up and turned into capitalist property. New communications and other technologies have allowed capital to colonize public spaces and culture. In sum, the tentacles of the new global capitalism reach much deeper than previously into every nook and cranny of the world; the domination of capital becomes ever more encompassing and imposing.

Third is the creation of a global legal and regulatory structure, which includes the World Trade Organization and many other institutions, to facilitate emerging globalized circuits of accumulation.

And fourth is the neo-liberal program. The well-known package of measures that are imposed through structural adjustment programs includes liberalization, privatization, deregulation, austerity, and so forth. In the broader picture, neo-liberal structural adjustment is intended to establish the conditions for the free operation of capital within and across national borders – to create a single unified field for global capitalism.

Global capitalism – neo-liberalism and structural adjustment – really begins in Ethiopia with the fall of the Mengistu regime in 1991. Meles Zenawi is the “poster child” of the good neo-liberal African. The Tigrayan regime has been the instrument of global capitalism. It has opened up the country to transnational corporate plunder and has undertaken massive privatizations (to transnational capital and to Ethiopian class groups and elites). The entrance of Ethiopia into the World Trade Organization will accelerate this process.

Ironically, the Mengistu regime created the pre-conditions for global capitalism in the country. For instance, its policies of removing millions of Oromos from their lands to make way for state farms created the perfect structural conditions later on for the entrance of transnational agribusiness, for a market in land, and for a dispossessed mass of Oromos as cheap and available labor for global capitalism. The Habasha elite historically allied with outside powers that they could use to reproduce their own internal domination. As of 1991, this alliance between the Habasha elites and transnational capital/global elites has become more organic, the former absorbing itself into latter.

Transnational Production, Transnational Classes, and the Transnational State

The crucial defining feature of global capitalism is the rise of truly transnational capital. Transnational capital is now the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale. The key thing here is the globalization of production itself – the dismantling of national economies and their reconstitution as segments of a globally-integrated production system. New globalized circuits of accumulation have particular properties that can, and have been, studied. Production processes have been fragmented and decentralized around the world. There is a network structure to the new globally-integrated production system. Vast chains of subcontracting and outsourcing link production circuits in each country and region to this larger global production system. National financial systems are a thing of the past; they have been integrated into a new and unprecedented single global financial system. This is a big part of the story of the current crisis.

Another key process has been transnational class formation. Both dominant and subordinate classes are transnationalizing. A global working class runs the factories, offices, and farms of the global economy. A new transnational capitalist class, or transnational bourgeoisie, is made up of the owners and managers of transnational capital – that is, the transnational corporations and financial institutions. The rise of this transnational capitalist class has been documented in an expanding body of empirical research and has taken place through such diverse mechanisms as the extension of foreign direct investment, transnational mergers and acquisitions, globalized stock markets, the transnational ownership of shares, and so forth. The transnational capitalist class is a class group with a subjective consciousness of itself and its interests. The members of this class group socialize with each other – for instance, in the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland – and develop a transnational class consciousness. In contrast, the global working class is “in itself” but not “for itself.” Politically and subjectively, globalization has worked as a centripetal force for transnationally-oriented capitalists and as a centrifugal force for the global working class.

Dominant class relations have shifted worldwide in favor of new transnational fractions among dominant groups tied to global economic processes. Neo-liberalism is fundamentally a program of transnational capital. Transnationally-oriented elites captured governments and the “commanding heights” of state policy-making around the world in the 1980s and 1990s, symbolized by the coming to power of the Reagan and Thatcher regimes. They utilized national state apparatuses to advance sweeping globalization. There are still local, national, and regional capitalists, but local capital must link up to transnational circuits to remain competitive, and local state elites must link their states to these circuits to retain their status.

In Ethiopia this project has been full of contradictions. Nonetheless, it is clear that transnationally-oriented groups have emerged to assume the reigns of the transnational agenda inside the country. Jalata (2006: 46) has observed:

The military and political leaders of TPLF/EPRDF have emerged as a new capitalist class [through illegal means and] dominate the Ethiopian political economy… Using state power, this new class has expropriated state corporations in the name of privatization and established joint businesses with either local investors or foreign corporations.

In fact, this pattern is similar to Latin America and elsewhere, whereby local transnationally-oriented groups emerge through privatization and neo-liberalism. In Ethiopia, this process has been highly ethnicized and predicated on Habasha domination over the state and over Oromia.

Another key aspect of capitalist globalization is the transnationalization of the state. We are witnessing the supersession of the nation-state as the organizing principle of world capitalism. This does not mean that the nation state is disappearing or is irrelevant. Rather, an emergent transnational institutional network plays an increasing role in organizing global accumulation. Capitalism cannot exist without the state. Nation-states are central to the political organization of the system, but they are becoming transformed and absorbed into the larger institutional structures of a transnational state apparatus. The emerging transnational state institutionalizes the new class relations between global capitalism and global labor. For instance, when the IMF conditions loans on the reform of national labor codes so that workers become flexibilized it is imposing the new capital-labor relations.

Out of this emerging transnational institutionality, the new class relations and social practices of global capitalism are becoming congealed and institutionalized. The state as a class relation is becoming transnationalized. The transnational state generates the conditions for globalized capital accumulation. For example, when the United Nations sends peacekeeping forces to Haiti or to the Sudan, it is attempting to resolve local conflicts and achieve the stability necessary for global markets to function. The first thing the United States – as the most powerful single organ of a larger transnational state apparatus – decreed once it had occupied Iraq was that the country was open to investors from anywhere in the world and that the U.S. political military occupation would provide the juridical and coercive canopy necessary for transnational capitalists to operate in the country. The U.S. state now functions less to establish a new U.S. hegemony in competition with other powers than to defend and advance global capitalism. And we should hold no illusions about the Obama administration. Obama’s policies actually strengthen – that is, re-legitimate – the role of the U.S. state as the principal instrument of global capitalism. The U.S. president laid out very clearly in his July 2009 speech in Ghana the current agenda of global capitalism in Africa.

Now, there is a fundamental contradiction here: an economy that is globalizing within the political framework of a nation-state/inter-state system. This helps us, but only in part, to understand the current crisis. The transnational state apparatus – these political institutions of global capitalism – are incipient and unable to regulate or stabilize the system. Before turning to the current crisis, let us recall that global capitalism is fraught with contradictions and observe how these contradictions have unfolded in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia and Global Capitalism

In 1997 I wrote:

[Transnational elites] hoped that the leadership of the Tigrayans, the Eritreans, the Amhara, the Oromo, and other ethno-national groups in the Ethiopian empire, would develop a working consensus amongst themselves around implementing the transnational agenda in Ethiopia: 1) structural adjustment and the opening of the empire to free market global capitalism; 2) the installation of a functioning polyarchic (“democratic”) political system in which elites of different groups would peacefully compete with and accommodate one another, thus assuring stability as the empire opened up to transnational capital… The elite leadership of Ethiopia’s principal groups and movements, namely the Amhara, the Tigrayan, and the Oromo, were expected to cohere into a national elite attuned to the transnational agenda… [However], the project of global capitalism for Ethiopia has only been partially successful, specifically because U.S. officials and global elites have never been able to grasp the nature and extent of ethnonational domination, especially of the Oromo.

That is what I wrote in 1997. Such ethno-national domination, on the one hand, has been essential to the whole history of world capitalism; it is constitutive of world capitalism. On the other hand, such domination has presented obstacles in different countries to smooth transitions to global capitalism. For example, apartheid was incompatible with the new epoch of global capitalism. Those obstacles were overcome by global and local elites in South Africa. They have not been overcome in Israel/Palestine, and they have not been overcome in Ethiopia. The transnational elite objective is precisely to avoid reliance on regimes that enjoy little internal legitimacy and that are not solidly rooted in a constituted civil society, and must, therefore, resort to state repression rather than to mechanisms of hegemony, consensus-building, and cooptation. This transnational project is extremely difficult to implement in Ethiopia precisely because mass repression of the main super-exploited segment of the empire – the Oromo people – has been an institutionalized, indeed, structural feature of empire.

We should note that the stabilization of global capitalism in Ethiopia requires the development of Oromo political and economic elites that can act as local mediators of the global system and can exercise hegemonic control over the Oromo masses. Yet, this is a contradictory situation. Habasha ethno-national domination undermines this effort to create an Oromo elite identified with global capitalism. Jalata (2006: 34) notes:

The Meles regime believes that Oromo intellectuals, businessmen and women, and community and religious leaders are the enemy of ‘the Ethiopian revolution.’ … Its organ known as Hizbawi Adera… asserts that ‘only by eliminating the Oromo educated elite and capitalist class will the Oromo people be freed from narrow nationalism.’

This is a fundamental contradiction of the project of global capitalism in Ethiopia. As far as global capitalism in Ethiopia is concerned, Oromia is a region with vast resources that transnational capital covets:

• It provides the main source water for whole region and of hydro-electric power;
• It has the best agricultural lands, a key breadbasket for the Horn of Africa, and is a potential center for large-scale transnational corporate agri-business;
• It has major reserves of natural gas and oil (the latter is also located in Ogadenia)
• It has massive mineral resources – gold, silver, platinum, uranium, marble, nickel, sulfur, and iron-ore, among others;
• It has a 40+ million-strong labor reserve.

Opening up Oromia to global capitalism has been predicated on the political vehicle of the Tigrayan regime, for whom political power is its own coercive instrument assuring access to those resources, and which is used as well to help displace class and social contradictions within the Habasha population.

Global Crisis: Financial Speculation and Militarized Accumulation

There are four interrelated dimensions to the global crisis:

1) It is a crisis of social reproduction, of global polarization. As has been well documented, global inequalities have reached barbaric levels and continue to get worse;
2) It is a crisis of overaccumulation, a dimension to which I will return momentarily;
3) It is a crisis of legitimacy and political /authority. States face spiraling fiscal and legitimacy crises and global hegemony, in the Gramscian sense of consensual domination, is breaking down;
4) It is a crisis of ecological sustainability. The current global capitalist order is unsustainable. An ecological holocaust is underway. It is already having a devastating impact on the poor and it will aggravate the other dimensions of the crisis.

I want to focus here on the second dimension of this global crisis. In broad strokes, globalization should be seen as capital’s response to previous episodes of crisis, especially to the crisis of the 1970s. Globalization opened up vast opportunities for accumulation worldwide and in the 1980s and 1990s transnational capital experienced a frenzied period of accumulation. But by the turn of the century, this expansion ran up against certain limits. The opportunities to accumulate through privatizations began to dry up as much of the public assets around the world became privatized. Once the old Soviet bloc and Third World revolutionary states integrated into the global market there were no longer any new regions to bring into the system. Global markets reached saturation and overcapacity set in. By the new century, the system was headed towards a structural crisis. The global economy expanded as the global market contracted. The economy generated ever larger surplus while opportunities to absorb that surplus diminished. Once the boom of the 1980s and 1990s wound down the opportunities to profitable reinvest the surplus began to dry up.

Crisis theory posits that this is a fundamental contradiction of the system: over-accumulation follows periods of hyper-accumulation. The capitalist system is faced with the permanent challenge of how to unload surpluses and hence to sustain accumulation. The system has been stumbling into one crisis scenario after another. First, there was the Mexican “peso crisis” of 1995. This was followed by the Asian financial meltdown of 1997-98, followed by collapses in Russia, Turkey, Brazil, and elsewhere, and then the collapse and social explosion in Argentina, and worldwide recession in 2001. The transnational elite sounded alarm bells. George Soros, a global financier, multi-billionaire, and leading organic intellectual of the global elite, famously warned of the need to “save capitalism from itself.”

By the turn of the century, two major mechanisms for unloading surplus and sustaining accumulation took over the in global system: financial speculation and militarized accumulation.

With regard to financial speculation, this has been a finance-led process of globalization. Transnational finance is the most mobile sector of capital. Thanks to computer and information technologies and financial deregulation, it has achieved near total, frictionless mobility. The so-called “revolution in finance” has involved the creation of all sorts of new financial instruments, or “derivatives,” including mortgage-backed securities, futures markets, hedge funds, pyramiding of assets, and many more. The purpose of these derivatives is to make every pile of money – both positive money (credit) and negative money (debt) – a commodity that can be traded and, therefore, a source of accumulation.

Transnational finance capital has developed new powers to appropriate and manipulate values. And it has proved to be utterly predatory. The sequence of speculative waves in the global casino includes:

• Real estate investment in global cities and the creation of a global property market;
• Several cycles of stock market inflations, or bubbles, followed by busts, including the inflation and then the bust from 1997 to 2003 of the dot-com stock market that had so elated transnational investors;
• An escalation of speculation in derivatives involving an unprecedented wave of speculation with debt worldwide;
• The uncontrolled expansion of the U.S. consumer debt, which grew five-fold from 1980 to 2001, jumping just from 1998 to 2008 from $100 billion to over $1 trillion, which temporarily converted the United States into the market of last resort for the world economy;
• The wave of speculation in global commodities markets, particularly in food and energy markets, in 2007 and 2008, which drove up food prices worldwide, sparking food riots around the world and throwing millions more into hunger.

This global casino capitalism involves an ever-greater expansion of what is known as fictitious capital, or money thrown into circulation without any base in commodities, in productive activity. The gap has been growing rapidly between the global speculative economy and the productive – or what the mass media calls the “real” – economy. In 2000, the IMF reported, for instance, that the worldwide trade in goods and services was less than $10 trillion for the entire previous year whereas the daily movement in currency speculation stood at $3.5 trillion! We have been witnessing a historically unprecedented de-coupling of finance from productive activity and from real, that is, material, wealth creation. By the early 21st century, massive concentrations of transnational finance capital were destabilizing they system. We finally reached the limits to this “financial fix” to the problem of over-accumulation. The collapse of the U.S. consumer mortgage market, in particular, the sub-prime market, in 2007, triggered the devastating collapse of the global financial system in September 2008.

Meanwhile, the U.S. state has militarized global accumulation. The cutting edge of accumulation has shifted from computer and information technologies to a military-security-industrial-construction-petroleum complex. The misnamed “war on terrorism” and the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan have cost trillions of dollars. In 2003, military spending accounted for a full 70 percent of the total rise in the U.S. GDP. This state-organized spending is in no way limited to the United States. To the contrary, these resources flow through the worldwide network structures of the global economy – these are the “open veins” of the new global economy. For instance, contracts awarded by the U.S. state to such global corporations as Halliburton for “reconstruction” in Iraq are, in turn, dished out through subcontracting and outsourcing networks to Indian and Chinese supply firms, Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti construction companies, Jordanian engineering enterprises, Philippine labor recruiters, South African and Colombia security (mercenary) firms, and so on. In this way, U.S. military spending throws fresh firewood on the smoldering embers of the global economy.

The “war on terrorism” is a convenient political-ideological mechanism to legitimate the transition to a global war economy. And the Ethiopian regime has managed to find a new political niche as an instrument of the so-called “war on terror” in the Horn.

How will this crisis unfold? Is it a cyclical crisis? The recessions of the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and the early 21st century were clearly cyclical. But the current crisis if more than cyclical; it is structural, as were the crises of the 1970s, and before that, of the 1930s. Structural crises are crises of restructuring, meaning that the only way out of the crisis is to restructure the system. Restructuring in the wake of the 1930s crisis resulted in the Fordist-Keynesian model, and restructuring in the wake of the 1970s crisis led us into globalization. Is it a systemic crisis, that is, a crisis that will result in a change to a new system? Well, not at this time. Whether or not a structural crisis becomes a systemic crisis depends on the response of distinct social forces to crisis. What are some of the responses, and the alternative futures, we can discern? There are many possible scenarios. Social change is not predetermined and is always open-ended.

I can imagine, among others, four possible scenarios, none of which are mutually exclusive:

1) A global neo-Keynesianism. This would be a project that seeks to save the system from itself from its own destructive tendencies through such reforms as regulation of the global financial system and the introduction of some redistributive measures in the global economy. Those seeking a global reformism range from elites, such as Joseph Stiglitz and George Soros, to governments, such as that of Obama, forums, such as the G-20, and several of the United Nations agencies.
2) A resurgent leftist project. Anti-capitalist, socialist, radical reformist and populist programs and movements are spreading. The World Social Forum and the proliferating social movements of the global justice movement, with their rallying cry, “another world is possible,” are indicative of this project. The “weakest link” politically speaking in the project of global capitalism is Latin America, where Venezuela is attempting to construct a “21st century socialism.”
3) A 21st century fascism. The need for mass social control in the face of crisis gives a powerful impetus to neo-fascist projects, which are evident everywhere, from the United States and Europe, to Colombia and Ethiopia.
4) A global collapse; a “new dark ages,” or global warlordism. This is the so-called “Somali scenario” at the global level.

Global Crisis and the Oromo Struggle

The global crisis presents grave dangers, but also opens up space for the influence of social forces from below and for new ideas to flourish as we step into the unknown. Let us recall the theme of this 23rd annual conference of the Oromo Studies Association: “Looking for Opportunities in Crisis.” In my view, the only hope for a resolution of this crisis is to massively redistribute wealth and power downward to the poor majority in global society. Such a redistribution will come about not by the good will of those from above but by mass struggle by those from below coordinated across national and regional borders and involving the development of transnational counterhegemonies.

With regard specifically to the Oromo situation, I wrote in 1997:

What is to be done regarding the Oromo liberation struggle? That is, as a matter of course, a decision for the Oromo people. But it is a decision that must be taken within the real constraints to social change and emancipation that global capitalism places on each nation and people. … I do not know whether Oromo liberation can be achieved within an Ethiopian nation-state [for ex, through autonomy or through majority rule], or if achieving such liberation requires the establishment of an independent Oromia … What is progressive at any historic conjuncture is what advances the interests of popular majorities – their control over the conditions of their existence and their prospects for social emancipation.

By way of conclusion, I would add here that the mounting crisis in Ethiopia will merge more closely now with the global crisis and could generate an explosive situation as we move towards the 2010 elections. The global crisis is current macro context and global conjuncture for the Oromo struggle. However, this struggle continues in 2009 and on, it will unfold under the larger conditions of the crisis of global capitalism.

References
Jalata, Asafa. 2006. “The Impact of Ethiopian State Terrorism and Globalization on the Oromo National Movement,” The Journal of Oromo Studies, Volume 13, Numbers 1 & 2, July, pp. 19-56.

Robinson, William I. 1997. “Global Capitalism and the Oromo Liberation Struggle: Theoretical Notes on U.S. Policy Towards the Ethiopian Empire,” The Journal of Oromo Studies, Volume 4, Numbers 1 & 2, pp. 1-46.

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* William I. Robinson is a professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies, at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Professor Robinson’s latest book is Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)

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